Famous Writers and Their Work Spaces Come Together in a Mural

By ERIC KONIGSBERG

Published: August 1, 2008

CORRECTION APPENDED

Elena Climent was standing in front of the '60s poet Frank O'Hara's desk on a recent afternoon when she noticed that on bookshelves belonging to the urbanist Jane Jacobs, six volumes of Roman history were out of order.

''That's always the way it happens when somebody takes books down and uses them,'' said Ms. Climent, a painter who lives with her family in Morningside Heights. Pointing at Edith Wharton's bookcases, grandly stretching to the ceiling and lined with leather-bound editions of the author's own works, she remarked on what luxe objects books were 100 years ago. Then Ms. Climent, 53, took a single step across the decades to visit Washington Irving's study.

She is neither a time traveler nor a superhero able to simultaneously inhabit several disparate corners of American literary history at once. Rather, Ms. Climent was showing off the large trompe-l'oeil mural she had painted for New York University's Languages and Literature building at 19 University Place.

The mural, ''At Home With Their Books,'' measures 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and depicts, in six chronologically ordered panels, the writing spaces of six authors who spent some, if not all, of their careers in New York. Ms. Climent said the university selected three of the authors and asked her to choose three, but stipulated that none could be living.

''They were concerned they would be lobbied by everybody,'' she explained. ''I would have loved to do one for Bob Dylan, just to be able to see his mess.''

New York University was initially interested in a mural depicting the rear views of New York theaters, Ms. Climent said, but she sold them on her writerly notion. ''I applied because I love the idea of a mural as a world a person can step into and inhabit,'' she said. ''I've always done small-format paintings, and this is painted with the same technique: small brushes.''

Completing the mural took 18 months, much of it devoted to researching the rooms, conditions and rituals of each writer's work. Besides the four below, Jane Jacobs and Pedro Pietri are commemorated. Here is a closer look:

PHOTOS: Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) An important member of what was known as the New York School of poets, O'Hara was killed in an accident on Fire Island at age 40. ''The scene at the top is of University Place, just outside the window here, and the old Cedar Tavern was one block down from where it is now,'' Ms. Climent said. Of the orange liquid on his desk, Ms. Climent explained: ''He drank a lot. So I put that there.'' ''He liked to do art projects,'' Ms. Climent said of the roll of toilet paper near Mr. O'Hara's typewriter. ''It's for when you use watercolor or ink, you need something to dry the brush on.''; Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) ''Her house was very difficult to research because she was so poor,'' Ms. Climent said. ''And one of the things that I noticed is that writers don't get photographed writing. It's not like painters in their studios.'' In a published collection of Hurston's letters, Ms. Climent found a reference to The Saturday Evening Post's sending a photographer to the author's home. She found the 1951 photo of her house in Florida at the University of Chicago, which has the magazine's archives.; Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Born into a wealthy New York family, Wharton spent a decade living in an estate known as the Mount in Lenox, Mass., that was extensively restored and for several years was open to the public as a sort of museum. ''I was lucky that I got to go there and photograph it before it went broke and closed down,'' Ms. Climent said. Pointing at the mural, she added: ''Wharton wrote 'The House of Mirth' in that bedroom. But the fountain pen hadn't been invented yet, so I put it on the shelf in front -- because it came later in her career. I re-created her habit of throwing papers on the floor.''; Washington Irving (1783-1859) Ms. Climent said that she read Irving, who is famous for biographies of Washington, Columbus and Muhammad and histories of 15th-century Spain as well as his whimsical essays and short stories, ''at an early age.'' ''He was probably more famous in Spain than over here,'' she said of Irving, who served as the United States' minister to Spain for a time. ''He was very important: he invented Knickerbocker, and the imaginary New York.'' ''Also, his way of writing is so visual,'' she added. ''The way he describes a piece of bacon and the light hitting it: he's like Rembrandt.''; Elena Climent with her mural ''At Home With Their Books,'' at New York University. It depicts works and work places of six writers, using authentic details. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY HIROKO MASUIKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Correction: August 7, 2008, Thursday
A picture caption in some editions on Friday with an article about a mural at New York University depicting writers' work spaces included an incorrect statement from the artist about the status of the former home of Edith Wharton, in Lenox, Mass., that was shown. The home, known as the Mount, remains open to the public during the spring and summer; it did not go broke and close. (Financial difficulties of the past year have caused it to struggle with the threat of foreclosure, however.)